Quilting has been practiced for several centuries throughout the world. Quilts were originally used as bed covers for warmth. Currently, most quilting is performed by hobbyists and smaller businesses and is oriented broadly towards arts and craft, including artistic decoration and historic and commemorative patterns. Originally, quilting was done by hand stitching of patterns, or different pieces of fabric to form patterns, on the fabric layers for purposes of ornamentation and to bind the fabric and internal batting layers together. As the making of quilts has become more hobby oriented, hand stitching has become less common because of the lack of time by hobbyists. Hobbyists and small companies also desire to make larger quilts to accommodate modern queen and king sized beds and to make a larger number of quilts in the same time as previously needed to make a quilt using hand sewing methods.
Designs or patterns are sewn into portions of a quilt by hand, by using a hand guided sewing machine, by using a template-guided sewing machine, or by using a computer guided sewing machine. Several decades ago, large professional quilting frames became commercially available and included sewing machines having a throat depth on the order of 24 inches. The throat depth of a sewing machine restricts the size of a pattern that can be sewn when used with a quilting frame. Such professional quilting frames were, and still are, very expensive and require a considerable amount of space to set up and use. In recent years, lightweight, less expensive, hobby-oriented quilting frames or frame kits for use with a home sewing machine or for use with a smaller version of professional sewing machines have become common.
Home sewing machines, however, have very limited throat depth—on the order of 6–9 inches. Thus, both hobby quilting frames and professional quilting frames are restricted to sewing patterns having a lateral dimension no larger than the throat depth of the sewing machine, less the amount of space occupied by the take-up roller (including the fabric layers and batting rolled onto the take-up roller). This restriction occurs because the take-up roller is fixed in relationship to the payout rollers in order to maintain fabric tension. The take-up roller is located within the throat of the sewing machine and takes up the quilted material typically consisting of fabric layers and internal batting. Accordingly, the lateral “working pattern depth” motion of the sewing machine needle is restricted to the depth of the exposed material within the depth of the sewing machine throat. As the take-up roller gets larger with the accumulated completed quilt, this “working depth” gets smaller and smaller. The result is that patterns must be completed in ever-narrowing longitudinal strips—some as small as 4 inches. This is a major problem for, and complaint of, owners of present hobby quilting frames. This limited working depth problem has caused many potential buyers of hobby quilting frames to not purchase such a product.
Some manufacturers of professional quilting frames have added motors with controlling electronics to the fixed payout and/or fixed take-up rollers. However, motorizing fixed rollers does not allow for sewing larger patterns because the working depth and area is still restricted by a combination of the fixed spatial relationship of the rollers and the throat depth of the sewing machine. As a result, motorized roller systems are used to automatically create quilts with only very simplistic patterns by sewing in an area limited to the throat depth of the sewing machine, automatically advancing the quilt to expose a new working depth (a new “strip”), then sewing the next area (strip), and so on. Such roller motors simply advance the fabric layers in working depth increments through the quilting frame. In addition, roller motors and associated control electronics of automated commercial machines are expensive and are normally used only for production of simplistic patterned quilts. They are not available for, and do not address, the needs of the hobby-quilt artist, particularly in cases of large, complex or intricate artistic patterns.
Although professional quilting machines use sewing machines with deeper throats, up to 30 inches, the payout and take-up rollers are of a fixed nature and thus only permit sewing patterns limited by that throat depth. Likewise, the payout and take-up rollers of conventional hobby quilting frames are fixed, and the throat depth is even smaller by virtue of use of smaller and less expensive sewing machines.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to provide an apparatus and method for quilting that allows sewing of larger patterns independent of the limitations of the sewing machine throat depth that is simple, inexpensive and automatic, that is applicable to free hand, computer controlled X-Y carriage and template-guided pattern sewing for a wide range of hobby arts and craft quilting that permits the sewing of full pattern depth, whether 6″, 8″, 12″, 16″, 24″ or more in depth, the full longitudinal width of the quilt, rather than decreasing strips of partial patterns, eliminating pattern registration errors, and which effectively provides a larger than normal pattern area for automatic pattern sewing with home-type non-commercial sewing machines.